Born and raised on Bond

When I was interviewed for The A.V. Club’s Why We Love - Pride Edition series, I shared publicly for the first time many of the ideas about Bond that had been going around in my head for years.

As anyone who knows me is well aware, once you start me talking about Bond I have a hard time shutting up. The lovely people at The A.V. Club decided to place the full interview on their YouTube channel, which you can view here (including outtakes as I find my words in the first couple of minutes). I have also done a short contents (below) so you can jump to the parts that interests you, along with links to pieces I’ve written which expand on these topics.

0:00 Why is the whole spying genre inherently queer? (including Jason Bourne)

1:00 Real life queer spies who “turned”

2:52 Beyond Bond: queer villains (Wint & Kidd)

4:40 Born and raised on Bond (The British affinity for Bond, Bank Holiday Bond, taping Bond films off TV as a child, Bond as common denominator in conversation)

7:00 Bond getting the girl… but not for long. Maybe he should try a man?

8:21 Bond as stereotypical gay man

11:05 Identifying with the Bond girls (especially Xenia Onatopp).

12:20 Why the ‘harder’ films have so much queer appeal (especially Licence to Kill and Casino Royale).

13:55 Bond’s loneliness and letting people in. Double entendres: not taking sex seriously.

15:05 Performing masculinity: 6 men - a mutable character. Why I hate the codename theory.

16:05 Bond’s big gay Martini